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Five thousand people attended the vibrant Climate Emergency Rally in Melbourne on June 5. Grassroots environment activists and groups came from all over Victoria to protest numerous environmentally destructive projects currently underway or proposed, demanding action instead be focused on renewable energy and public transport.
Professor Ross Garnaut’s draft review of climate change policy options for the Australian government was released on July 4, with climate change minister Penny Wong due to release a green paper canvassing policy options on July 16. Garnaut’s report looks at the “costs” and “benefits” of mitigating drastic climate change through a carbon polluting trading scheme. It suggests tax cuts and “welfare reform” to compensate low-income households, which will be hit hard by energy price rises.
Hundreds of building workers took their demand for the secretive Australian Building and Construction Commission to be abolished to its headquarters on St Kilda Road on June 26. The protest was timed to coincide with the compulsory hearing of four crane workers, all members of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU).
The following article is abridged from a June 26 post on http://peruanista.blogspot.com. The full article, along with a series of videos on the struggle, can be found at http://links.org.au.
A Northern Town — With a third of Kempsey's population made up of Aboriginal people, the town is a hotbed of covert and overt racism on one hand, and Third World poverty and oppression on the other. SBS, Friday, July 11, 7.30pm. Message Stick:
According to the official website for World Youth Day (WYD), Sydney will “look different” from APEC. Really? With 600-plus areas now officially “declared areas”, not to mention proscribed airspace throughout July, and officials with the right to decide who is annoying and who isn’t, it doesn’t seem very different. If anything, it’s worse.
Indigenous communities have been underfunded and deprived of essential resources for decades because of faulty census data, a technical paper produced by Australian National University (ANU) academics has discovered.
The last month in Afghanistan has seen the anti-occupation Islamist Taliban forces stage a jailbreak of 1200 of prisoners in Kandahar, threats by the US’s puppet Afghan President Hamid Karzai to attack Pakistan (the major US ally in the region), the killing of 11 Pakistani soldiers in a border clash with occupation troops, pro-Taliban insurgents reach the Pakistani city of Peshawar and the highest number of casualties for both US and other occupation forces for any month since the October 2001 invasion.
David Rovics has been described as the musical voice of the progressive movement in the US. In this interview with Green Left Weekly’s Matt Clark, he explains his motivations, his influences and his take on politics today.
This article is based on a talk given by Naomi Rodgers-Falk to the closing session of the Resistance National Conference, held at the University of Technology, Sydney, on June 27 to 29.
A public meeting on June 24 against the proposed desalination plant drew 500 people. The gathering, 12 months after a 700-strong public meeting that kicked off the campaign, vowed to continue the fight against the energy-inefficient and costly non-solution to Melbourne’s water crisis.